Theory vs. Practice: Shall E’er the Twain Meet?
February 2nd, 2009
I just got a flyer for the Spring 2009 Software Test & Performance conference to be held in San Mateo from March 31 to April 2 this year. The faculty include:
| Paul Anderson | Chris Gottbrath | Joy Nandi |
| Dan Bartow | Michael Hackett | Kim Pries |
| Joe Basirico | Mukesh Jain | Jon Quigley |
| Ryan Berg | Jeff Johnson | Bj Rollison |
| Vitaly Bulgakov | David Kapfhammer | Chris Sims |
| Hans Buwalda | Ian Knox | Meera Subbarao |
| Nada daVeiga | Bill Loeb | Mary Sweeney |
| Lars Ewe | Brian Massey | Robert Walsh |
| Jeff Feldstein | Judy McKay | Alfred Wong |
| Bob Galen | Rick McPhee | Hon Wong |
As far as I can tell from DBLP, few if any of these 30 people publish in academic journals. Putting it another way, almost nobody who publishes academic work on quality assurance is going to be teaching at this conference, which will probably have more practitioners in attendance than every QA-related academic conference this year. *sigh*
There is a wonderful interview with Neal Stephenson on Slashdot where he compares academic writers (he calls the Dante writers) with commercial writers (which he calls Beowulf writers) and points out that they live in entirely separate worlds, for reasons both good and bad.
http://interviews.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/20/1518217
It’s the second question/answer and has my favourite line of all, “In order to set her straight, I had to let her know that the reason she’d never heard of me was because I was famous. ”
I don’t know if the same issues are at play in the QA academics vs. commercial divide, but it wouldn’t surprise me.